Wednesday 26th February 2014

4112/17031

I was up early to take my car in for a service, slightly disbelieving that I've had it for a year now. I was wearing the hoodie that I was given by Twitter after I'd done a gig for them, which has my twitter handle on it. People seem to like it, but it makes me a bit self-conscious as it seems that I am walking around trying to get people to tweet me (no one has as yet). Even though I like Twitter this is a bit much for me, but even though we are not a double act any more Stewart Lee and I seem to be keeping up our double act contract by holding opposite views on this. Old man Lee, the Luddite (or possibly the character he plays on stage, they can be so hard to tell apart) doesn't seem to realise that when someone tweets his location that it only gets seen by that people's followers, so he might as well rail against the telephone or general conversation. Of course if you search Stewart Lee you will see all the location news, something that Lee is only encouraging. But if you do that you'll see how many people are now making sightings up (with him eating massive amounts of food) so maybe his scheme has worked. He really is very clever. But not as clever as he thinks he is, but then (to quote Simon Munnery) who is that clever?

Perhaps he has found the ultimate way to hide in plain sight.

I on the other hand love the internet without any reservations and am thus an equally big twat. But I've found that by not appearing on TV I have severely limited the number of people who tweet about my location or recognise me and so can go about largely untroubled, even if I wear a hoodie with my name on it, begging people to record my location.

But at the garage the man asked my name and I told him. His colleague told him that he should have known as it was written on my top. The first guy said, "Oh yeah, nothing to do with fishing then?" which was a pretty weak joke even for 8.50am. If you were going to make a fish pun then there was surely something better than that. But I am not sure it's appropriate in a business situation to even give that a go. It's a bit over-familiar. It's not "Someone Likes Yoghurt", but it's close. I suppose Herring 1967 could be the number of herrings I have caught. But it would seem a costly exercise to keep that kind of update on my hoodie (either a lot of restitching or a new top every time I catch another one) and why was I concentrating exclusively on one kind of fish?

He was trying to be friendly, but slightly miscalculating the boundaries. When we went to check my car for scratches I was forced to concede that it was probably too dirty to be sure if there was any damage. I haven't cleaned it over the winter months and have been notching up the miles and the dirt and salt deposits. He tried to make a gag about it being dirty and uncared for. Then worried he might have been misinterpreted said, "unlike its owner". But I was looking scruffy, having just got out of bed and was wearing my old running gear as I planned to run home and I noticed the hoodie has some food spilled on it. So drawing attention to that fact just left us with a bit of an eggy pause. Ah well.

It turned out to be a very good day for the diet. I was busy doing all kinds of admin and didn't snack much, but had a couple of long walks (I was too tired to run home) and ran the three miles back to garage when my car was ready. I ended the day with 850 calories in hand and I didn't even feel hungry.

The car had been cleaned. Even I had to admit that it looked like they'd given me a new one.

I had another premonition that something bad was going to happen to me tonight. I had already been right about the towel, but would this prediciton prove right. On the way home I had to swerve to avoid a car exitting a petrol station without really looking and walking to my gig tonight a car suddenly tried to reverse back out of a street as I was walking behind it. But I was too quick-witted to be hit. In central London I walked passed a bus stop and was about five metres down the road when there was a load explosive smash like a mini bomb or gun shot. But it turned out a man had dropped a jar of Dolmio sauce. It had impacted with the pavement spreading its blood-like contents over a small area. Had I been just five seconds behind where I was I could have got tomato on my shoe. If they turn this into another in the Final Destination franchise then I think the audience will be disappointed.